The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle

Quoting: "MaximB, post: 1550"I'll post about it on LGN (we are not dead....yet).

Hey, channelling a bit of the old Caleb there are we? :p

Definitely worth getting for a fixed up DRM free port of Shadowgrounds. I just wonder if it is working on R300g and R600g yet. Considering they both have S3TC available now and Quake 4 and Amnesia are now supposed to be working... :D

EDIT: Damn, does not look like it, at least for Trine:

QuoteCrash location is not inside the game binary but possibly your graphics driver. Mesa driver is not officially supported and has not been tested. Can you install proprietary ATI driver?

Please provide your opengl extensions string from glxinfo.

Turo Lamminen
Alternative Games

Well i found info on their blog about things so i have updated the first post for Jack Claw.

I don't know any "high profile" game that works right on open source drivers.

Tested Shadowgrounds Survivor and Trine, both work great for me :D, gives me more things to do on my time off in the weather is cack! This bundle came at just the right time for me!

I have actually done most of my gaming on free drivers, and these were on classic Mesa and not the new Gallium ones. Granted, my taste for older titles helps, but I am quite looking forward to playing Quake 4, Amnesia, and the like on the free drivers when Fedora 15 comes out defaulting to R600g. When they work they generally work better than the blobs in my experience.

That said I do not blame them for not testing on the free drivers, and considering their progress recently I would not be surprised if Trine is working on them by the end of the year. Last time I tried Shadowgrounds it did not work because lack of S3TC, it should at least go further than that now. :)

QuoteAlso worth noting is that there's work on making some of these Humble Indie Bundle games work under the open-source Mesa / Gallium3D drivers. There's already been [URL='http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=a9a02c8a39620515ec9fd0d774ce329cf67ecb4e']this commit[/URL] for exposing GL_ATI_draw_buffers so that Trine will function, assuming your drivers/hardware are fast enough, etc. These driver issues have been discussed at length in our forums.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTMyNw

Apparently the games are now working with the addition of some new Mesa patches, which should be included with Mesa 7.11 if I am correct. So the game should be able to run on a stock Fedora 15 now.

Yeah i read that, another good reason if more games come to Linux, people who like the games want to improve drivers, we all win!

QuoteFrozenbyte has also said they may open-source the Shadowgrounds games if some undefined milestone is hit (likely somewhere above $1M USD), but unless the rate of sales increase, they may have a hard time topping the [URL='http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODk1NA']$1.8M in sales[/URL] achieved by the bundle last December.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTM1Mg

I am still waiting on getting my copy until I can get some cash in hand, but I will certainly make sure I get it in time. This is just one more incentive. :D

I just got my copy last Sunday, will not bother to download it until I get my machine fixed up a bit, and even then it will have to be done at either my father's or brother's work as it is WAY to huge to download with our (should be illegal) bandwidth limit.

At any rate, here are some interesting comments by Joel from Frozenbyte that he posted on the Phoronix forums:

QuoteHi guys,

Yeah we're happy about the sales, no question about it. There's a lot of ifs one can throw around but at the end of the day we have got enough to cover the remainder of Trine 2 development. So that's good.

Just to set some facts straight:

- Jack Claw can be played on keyboard & mouse now (v2, F1 toggles between kb/mouse and the gamepad)

- Jack Claw Linux/Mac ports are coming very soon - Mac is already up and running but has some crash issues and doesn't look as good, and Linux isn't far behind

- There's a playable teaser flash of Splot available from the bundle download page (but of course not the same thing as an actual game)

The source codes use a custom license, as these are our first source code releases ever and we weren't quite sure about how to do it, so we went the route we thought was safest for now. We may move Jack Claw to GPL later (SGs maybe not, but who knows).

I hope this helps. Also a big thanks to everyone who's supported this.

- Joel, Frozenbyte

QuoteYes I think we'll get the games to the Ubuntu Software Center soon after the bundle. There's a gazillion things to take of first, but hopefully in a month or two we'll have them up there.

From our side I can say that we will deliver on our promises - the Mac/Linux of Jack Claw will be out soon and Splot should be out in 2-3 months. Of course schedules can always get messed up and we don't want to sacrifice quality for deadlines, but in any case we are not talking about too many months here. We've been doing this for a while (10 years actually) and I think we're professional enough to make it happen - and that was probably one problem for many purchasers. Some could say we're not as indie as the other companies/teams in the previous bundles, and maybe they're right - but I like to think that we very much have that same spirit here, despite being bigger and perhaps focusing on more "traditional" story-driven games.

The Intel situation is also a factor and has indeed prevented many people from enjoying the games (you can always get a refund from the Humble guys btw). This is something we most likely will never be able to fix unfortunately.

I think we'll be posting our "postmortem" on the bundle sometime this week on our blog, will be interesting.

Quoteallquixotic, thanks. I see your point (and read it earlier on our forums - thanks for all your insight there btw!). However the problem at the moment is that we have not yet familiarized ourselves with the GPL license or others, so it would be a much bigger risk at this point to go with that than with our custom one (at least we think we know what it allows, but yes I do see the point you make). I'd also say that if there's any license confusion, we are just an email away. Anyhow I hope to be able to talk more about this near the end of the week.

MaxToTheMax, yeah the code is messy, I've been listening to our programmers go off about it for years. It's hack upon hack, and all goes back to 2000/2001 and our RTS strategy game concept ("we don't need multiplayer right? Let's save a few months of work and write singleplayer only code.").

Let's see how the license evolves - hopefully I'll have some news on that later this week or early next week.